With the immediate area around Ponikla surveyed to some extent, conversation turns to which of the regional issues the team wants to investigate further. Ellis wants to go do his spook thing and perform a long-term infiltration of Tomaszow Mazowiecki to gather intel on the marauders infesting that city, so more direct action against them is off the table for now. Several PCs (and players) are interested in following up on the museum relocation lead, so it’s time to open up a new map hex. The team for this one is everyone but Miko (though Ellis will also take this opportunity to jump off on his operation).
Drinking water has been in short supply, but dehydration will kill, so some people have had to risk drinking from the river. Magda and Red both sleep poorly on the night of July 13. Red doesn’t remember his dreams but he awakens profoundly unsettled. Magda awakens in the pre-dawn hours with fragmentary memories of the river flooding the village and something crawling out of the water at the hostel’s front door…
[ Until the PCs solve the village’s water needs, I’m requiring everyone (when I remember) to start each session with a Survival roll. Failure means they didn’t forage or distill clean water and had to drink the river water, which brings a point of stress and a nightmare that may or may not be oracular…]
Following the driving directions salvaged from the truck that was carrying the fossils, the team crosses the river (carefully) and drives east. The directions terminate at the well-hidden entrance to a wilderness area. The native Poles in the party note that such sites were often used as private resorts for government officials… or as concealment for high-security military sites.
The team heads in slowly. Pettimore, ranging a bit ahead of the rest of the group, finds a large game trail and some sign that wisent frequent the area (which at least suggests some cleared routes that are unlikely to be mined). This prompts Pettimore to ask Minka to produce a few boar spears once she gets her forge up and running.
[ Wisent reintroduction in Poland is a bit anachronistic for the T2k timeline but I have a couple of things going here. From a mechanical perspective, I wanted something to replace the moose result on T2k 4e’s hunting table. From a plot perspective, this is another very small anomaly that ties into the overall framework of weirdness. ]
Moving further into the forest, a guard post appears, followed by a small parking area and the local equivalent of a ranger station. All show signs of minor combat followed by years-long abandonment. A somewhat-overbuilt road curves away from the parking area into the forest. With Pettimore still on point, the team creeps along.
Around a bend, Pettimore finds the first body.
It’s been there two or three months. It’s a Soviet soldier, apparently shot in the back with a high-caliber rifle. There’s an AKS-74 by the body, rusted into uselessness. Neither it nor the body have been looted.
About a hundred meters away in the direction from which the shot apparently came, visible through the summer foliage, is a cluster of buildings.
Fifty meters on, Pettimore finds another body. It’s another Soviet soldier, in similar condition, and similarly killed with a single shot. This one appears to have been taking cover behind a large tree and – from the empty magazine in his rifle and the 5.45mm casings scattered around – was returning fire when a round entered his right upper chest and exited somewhere around his shoulder blade.
All in all, the team finds a total of nine bodies. None have been looted. Their clothing and gear is heavily weathered, but some magazines and other items were protected in pouches or pockets. All were killed with through-and-through rifle hits.
The buildings are wood construction, probably fifty or sixty years old. At first glance, it’s some kind of camp or retreat complex. There are a dozen four-bedroom residential cabins, a communal restroom/shower facility, and a communal kitchen/dining/recreational facility. There are two sets of minor combat damage – one old, one new. And there are faded places on the wood exteriors where old decorations or plaques or signs were removed. On the dining hall, the weathered outline is clearly visible: a bird of prey with wings outstretched, atop a circular badge of some sort.
The road continues through the camp, still curving around the hill. Despite the summer sun, there’s a chill in the air as the PCs follow it past a few concrete pads that once held some sort of heavy machinery. Another couple of hundred meters on, the road ends at a turnaround and a massive bunker entrance. Despite aggressive use of a plasma torch at some point in the past, the emblem from the camp is clearer here.
The bunker door mechanism yields to Zenobia’s mechanical acumen and the team moves in. The UAZ-469’s headlights illuminate another guard post, which spans the entrance of a massive tunnel, easily wide and high enough to admit two tractor-trailers side by side. The main tunnel continues to a T-intersection. Off the cross tunnel are a total of 14 massive chambers, arranged all in one direction like the teeth of a comb. Each end of the cross tunnel has a ramp that curves upward to an upper level of the complex.
Ten of the individual chambers are empty, with cut-off pipes and wiring conduits and other marks showing where machinery was removed at some point in the distant past. Four, however, contain cargo pallets. Two of those appear to be copies of Warsaw’s municipal records from the decade before the war (1986-1996) – taxes, property ownership, city budget, city employees, survey plats.
[ Yes, I finally let them find maps. They’re just useless maps. ]
The final two chambers hold crates similar to those in which the team found the fossil collection. There’s enough for five truckloads – it seems the rest of Warsaw’s natural history museum made it here. Tearing open the crates, the team finds:
- an ornithological specimen collection
- an entomological specimen collection
- a Polish minerals collection and a display on the history of mining in Poland, including a geologic survey map [okay, still not useful tactically, but I’m sure they’ll find a way to get some value out of this one…]
- a fluid specimens collection (ichthyology and herpetology), along with a massive collection of water samples and a partial set of lab equipment from a long-term study of Vistula River ecology
- an exhibit on the oceanography, hydrology, and ecology of the Polish Baltic coast
The team spends a fair amount of time cataloging in here, but that upper level beckons. They pile back into the UAZ and slowly ascend the massive curving ramp. The upper level is arranged much like the lower one, with eight more large chambers jutting off one side of the central corridor. Again, most of the machinery once located here has been removed, but one of the chambers holds a massive cistern fed from what appear to be rain collection channels cut into the hilltop. Some of the power generation, air handling, and water purification machinery is also in place.
One of the chambers is secured with a massive set of steel doors. Zenobia [gets four successes on a Tech roll] has seen its like before, though – the locking mechanism is the same as a bank vault she and her father once worked on. She sets to work and, within a few minutes, the doors slide open.
Inside is another cistern. Where the first one had a safety railing around its perimeter, this one has a grid of steel bars laid horizontally across its surface. It’s deeper than the other one – so deep that the team’s flashlights can’t reveal its bottom. Leks pulls a magnesium flare from the UAZ’s go-kit and tosses it into the water.
The flare sinks… and sinks… and sinks. Its dwindling spark of light passes any reasonable depth, and indeed seems to have fallen far beyond where the complex’s lower level lies. As that tiny flicker drops completely out of view, Leks, Ellis, and Zenobia all see a swirl of motion in the depths…
… and Magda realizes the team’s Geiger counter is clicking.
Leks is profoundly shaken by whatever his visual cortex couldn’t quite process down in that water [2 stress]. The others are able to rationalize it away, but it’s still not a great time to be in a dark bunker that was probably built during the Nazi occupation. A hurried radiological survey reveals that the room has a background count about twice that of the surrounding area. It’s the room, not the water, so far as they can tell – but Red takes samples from both cisterns for later analysis.
Somewhat disturbed, the team heads back outside, making a stop for Ellis to load the Warsaw tax records. He expects some serious downtime during his infiltration of Tomaszow Mazowiecki, and he’s looking for financial trails of the conspiracy whose outlines he’s starting to perceive…
Back outside, the team returns to the camp. It shows signs of habitation by about eighteen people, and indications that they evacuated hastily about the same time as all those Soviet troops were shot and left where they fell. From the remaining personal effects and research materials, this was a cross-section of the museum’s academic and maintenance staff. The team secures a few more books and a couple of half-written articles and dissertations, but nothing earth-shattering.
The top of the hill beckons. The team struggles up there and finds the expected air intakes and water collection channels. The view is pretty good – through their binoculars, they can see as far as Tomaszow Mazowiecki, though they can’t make out many details. Looking down at the base of the hill, they spot a clearing that appears to have been cultivated by the last residents – and at its far edge, a glint of metal.
They descend and investigate. The metal is a plaque set into a granite slab at the edge of a small forested bower. The Polish words on the plaque read:
Here lie ten heroes who sacrificed themselves for Poland's future on May 14, 1944. Their attack on the German garrison here disrupted the occupiers' plans for this site and prevented the expansion of Operation "Riese" to this land. Though their names are lost to history, may their deeds be remembered forever by free Poles.
The vegetation around the marker is neatly trimmed. Someone’s been tending this site.
The PCs attempt to track the responsible party – figuring it might be the same sniper who dropped nine Soviets and left them as a warning to others – but the trail runs out once it reaches a main road. They range around the area a little more, but nothing else of immediate interest turns up. Ellis says his goodbyes (just for now, hopefully) and the rest of the team piles into the UAZ and starts the long drive back to Ponikla.
It’s well after dark by the time Red, Magda, Minka, Zenobia, Leks, and Pettimore return to the village that is their home. Uncharacteristically, Ewalina [one of the player-generated NPCs, a former high school science teacher and now the town’s sole educator] is waiting for them. Anxiously, she approaches them and asks, “did Malvina go with you?”
I’m fairly happy with how this session turned out, despite a fair amount of improvisation. It also gave me the opportunity to end on an additional “oh, shit” note, as the disappearing-kids problem finally made an on-screen appearance. Technically, injecting an immediate and local problem broke strict adherence to West Marches principles, but it felt right and it immediately engaged the players. No one was carrying damage at the end of this session, but several PCs had stress from sleep deprivation, pushed rolls, or weirdness encountered in this session, so I knew they were going to be a little ragged going into the search for Malvina.